Hobbyist Game Making Between Self-Exploitation and Self-Emancipation

Critics of both the game industry specifically and the cultural industries broadly have long drawn attention to how romantic ideals around creative and passionate work are exploited by cultural firms. Long hours, periods of contingent employment, and expectations of unpaid labour are all justified as the sacrifices that cultural workers make in order to ‘do what they love’. Drawing from interviews with 200 amateur game makers, a range of complex, and sometimes contradictory justifications of self-exploitation are identified. While some game makers speak of ambitions to one day get paid to make games, many others justify keeping their creative work separate from what they do for money as a form of self-emancipation.

The Investigation on Solution for Diseases Caused by Contingent Work

Contingent work was deemed as a precarious employment which could be characterised by an atypical, temporary and marginal form of work arrangement. There is increasing evidence that contingent employment is significantly associated with adverse health outcomes and three health outcomes will be expounded in this paper: depressive disorders, work-related fatigue and occupational injuries. Simultaneously, fruitful micro-and macro-level precautionary and recovery measures are also be provided, including application of positive psychology interventions (PPI strategies), amelioration of work environments and social support, establishment of a fatigue risk management system (FRMS), and development of multifaceted approaches. Furthermore, various recommendations will be afforded to improve the sustainability and practicability of the aforementioned measures in the future research. Overall, the effective implementation of precautions aimed at health promotion and injury prevention for temporary workforce is of paramount importance to the healthy development of the nation.

Recasting Life Is Strange: Video Game Voice Acting during the 2016–2017 SAG-AFTRA Strike

Video game voice acting does not rank among the core roles of video game production, yet actors in leading roles sometimes achieve wide recognition despite their contingent employment. In this article, we explore the role of voice actors in the video game culture using the specific case of the recasting of the video game series Life Is Strange, which was caused by the 2016 to 2017 SAG-AFTRA strike against video game companies. Our qualitative empirical analysis of journalistic coverage (including interviews with voice actors), promotional materials, press releases, and player discussions reconstructs the events of the game’s production and investigates the reception of the recasting with regard to actor-character identification and to labor conditions of voice actors. We find that voice actors, whose status is partly dependent on the popularity of their characters, attempt to rise “above the line” by engaging in relational labor.

Desperate Fortunes: Latina Warehouse Workers in the “Matrix of Domination”

Much recent labor research has highlighted the increasing reliance on contingent employment. We apply intersectionality theory and Collins’s concept of the “matrix of domination” to data from focus groups with immigrant Latina “perma-temp” warehouse workers ( n = 40), finding that the structural (dis-)organization of perma-temping serves as an instrument of domination and is crucial to our respondents’ experiences of work. However, the instability of these women’s contingent jobs entwines complexly with, and is compounded by, the subordination and decreased agency attached to their other minority statuses. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theory, future scholarship, and policy.

Sharing

This chapter examines popular and academic concerns that the sharing economy offers workers a raw deal—lower salaries, fewer benefits, and little job security—and that workers have essentially been forced to take sharing-economy jobs in the wake of the Great Recession, all of which have been masked by the communitarian rhetoric of sharing-economy proponents. The chapter does not dispute critics’ characterization of sharing economy practices as unsavory, but rather takes issue with the notion that contingent employment is necessarily a bad thing for workers. The chapter argues that concerns about the increasing precarity of labor are rooted in a rejection of the market and of money as inimical to valued social bonds. The antisocial thesis inspires a critical interpretation of money and the market as potentially liberatory.